


head over heels in the moment

by anaquarius



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, mentions of Glimmer/Bow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:48:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24248326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anaquarius/pseuds/anaquarius
Summary: "Don't you get it? I love you. I always have." A deeper look into some of the scenes in 5x13 "Heart: Part Two" along with pure Catradora fluff 'cause it's what we deserve.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 215





	head over heels in the moment

**Author's Note:**

> It's been almost a year since I've written fic, being a writing student and all, but after being invested in this show since the very beginning and getting to watch Noelle's plan from the beginning of a Catradora endgame... I really couldn't help myself. Any typos in this are my own fault. Enjoy!

i. someone will remember us

When they were younger, some bug crawled into their bunk and bit Adora while they were giggling-supposed-to-be-sleeping. Catra was ready to smash it right there, but Adora begged her not to. She can remember Adora’s small hands as she picked up the offender who hurt them in the first place and let it scatter out from under the door it appeared from.

Every time Catra would fight She-Ra before, she would think of herself as the bug. Adora had been taking pity on her.

Now, she just realizes Adora never takes pity on herself, divvying herself up to help so many causes she’s too reckless to see her own matters, too.

_Whatever happens, I’m staying with you!_

Now it’s as if her, the bug, was refusing to crawl out from under the door, asking to be stomped on. Because she’s not doing this without Adora. Not the one person who has been with her through everything, even if that meant standing on the opposite ends.

Her face is pale, the veins in her face popping out with whatever green gunk Horde Prime uses to sustain himself. She would do anything to see Adora’s face at its normal flush, even if it was angry at her.

When it grows impossibly paler, Catra freezes. “Adora, please. You have to wake up!” She’s practically shaking her. It hurts to talk, to cry, to breathe. “You can’t give up. You have never given up on anything in your life… not even on me.”

She talks anyway. She gets angry. Adora is so fucking stupid. When she lives through this Catra is going to get it into her stupid blonde head that her so-called ‘self-sacrificing’ tendencies were not worth the utter loss and despair that she― well, _everyone_ ― would feel if she went and killed her idiot self doing it. “Don’t you dare start now!”

Adora’s voice is barely even a whisper. If Catra wasn’t holding her close, feeling her breath hot on her ear, she wouldn’t have been able to hear it. “It’s too late. I’ve failed.”

It’s out of her mouth before Catra can stop it and reprimand herself for even verbally admitting it. “Don’t you get it? I love you. I always have.”

It’s not the way she thought she’d given the confession. Really, she’d never imagined herself giving it in the first place. But it’s out there to ferment for the rest of her days.

Adora’s eyes open. It’s like looking at a cloudless sky. She’s shocked. Catra can feel the heat of magic crackling near her back. She turns to look just as a shield is fading away. She wishes she could plug her ears. She hates to admit it, but her whole heart is too young to be broken one more countless time. She doesn’t think she can stand to hear Adora gently let her down. She does everything too gently.

“You love me?” 

“You’re such an idiot.” _Of course I do. How could I not? But it’s not―_

“I love you, too.”

The look in Adora’s eyes is so open Catra almost wants to turn around to make sure that it’s _her_ Adora is looking at. But her mind has become a blank slate, a static screen, so before her thoughts can even start to contemplate controlling her movements she reaches out and kisses her.

  
  
  


When Bow and Glimmer leave the hillside, Catra almost follows before Adora stops her, hand in hand, boots firmly in green grass. “Is this okay?”

“Yeah,” Catra says, in a voice that sounds like, _Of course, dummy_ , all over again. 

Adora pulls her closer. “I just know that when we go back we’re gonna be busy for, like, the next two months. And I want to have a few moments with you.”

Catra smirks. “Just a few?”

“You know I could spend a lifetime with you.”

Catra blushes at this. She wonders if she could say that she loves Adora again. She’s thought it more than any thought, probably, even more than the _I hate Adora_ ones, which, looking back, weren’t very true, anyway. There’s a part of her scared that if she says _love_ and _you_ and _Adora_ at the same time, in the same sentence too much there will come a time when the words will have been used up, and they’ll be physically impossible to leave her mouth. So she quirks up her eyebrows instead. “You know if we stay too long, Bow, Glimmer, and the rest will definitely tease us.”

“Let them. After all…” Adora gets a gushy look on her face, and she falls, putting her full body weight onto Catra. “You looooove me.”

“You quit that!” Catra playfully pushes Adora off, who responds by dramatically landing on the ground. Catra follows her down, laying beside her. “You’re never gonna let that go, are you?”

Adora’s expression grows serious. “As long as you don’t let it go for me, either.”

“I don’t even think I’d know how.”

They stay quiet for a minute, drinking the scenery, and each other, in. The bright fuzzes of magic cause Adora’s eyes to glow bright glass, like the kind Catra’s sure would reflect off of the highest castle, and her blond ponytail splayed out reminds her of the small patch of sunny yellow daffodils the two of them had once found growing on the edge of the Fright Zone several years back, fighting valiantly against the poison they’d been forced to seed in.

“Hey, Catra? What are you thinking about?”

“You,” Catra answers truthfully, and while many things have changed, the absolute joy she gets in making Adora flush hasn’t. 

Adora just scoots across the grass to get closer. “Me too.”

“Y’know, when I was younger…” Catra takes a deep breath. “I used to think I had made up how I felt about you. That I’d invented it.”

Adora leans into Catra. Touching each other is different now, Catra thinks, but it’s better than she could’ve been able to imagine. “Every love is different. In a way, we did invent it. Is it selfish to say that? Maybe. But I think we deserve to be selfish.”

“I wish I’d told you earlier,” Catra says.

“I wish I had learned what it meant before going into the Rebellion,” Adora says. “I can’t really remember a time where I didn’t love you, I just… didn’t know the words until after I’d left. And by then I was too scared to think about ever getting it back.”

Catra situates herself onto her side and finds herself softly clawing through Adora’s hair. “How could you even think that was possible?”

“I was just so angry. I felt like if you did feel the same way, you’d come with me. But you wouldn’t. And I never hated you. I hated how I wasn’t able to love you. Even if I don’t regret the choices I’d made.”

“I was angry because I’d felt like you’d chosen Glimmer and Bow and the princesses over me,” Catra says. “And it made me horrible.”

“The Horde―”

“I know the place I was in wanted me to be horrible, Adora, but it doesn’t mean I still wasn’t. But I get it now. I get that you wanted them and you also wanted me. Or I’m starting to get it. That love isn’t something to run out of. And I’m gonna be better.”

“You’re already better,” Adora says. “You have been for a while.”

“I think it’ll be awhile before I truly start to feel that way.” Catra flops completely back down, watching fluffy clouds roll by.

“Regardless of how y― Oh, Catra, look! A ladybug!” Adora sits up and crawls towards the edge of the cliff, dipping her finger into the grass and wiggling it until a bright red bug crawls onto her fingertips. “Pretty little thing.”

“I think I’ll make that my new term of endearment for you,” Catra jokes, sitting up, and Adora shoves her with the elbow not connected to the ladybug.

The ladybug reaches the end of Adora’s finger and flies away. “Aw. Goodbye!”

She gets it now.

“I love you,” Catra says. Screw saying it too much. She’ll say it until her vocal chords are ripped from her throat― or maybe she’ll be lucky enough to die of old age in her sleep. When she does, she’ll make sure to say it right before she does. Adora turns to look at her. “I love you. Yeah. I love you.”

Adora moves to wrap her arms around Catra. “I love you, too.”

ii. even in another time

Wrangling a tiara with picks into your hair without it looking like a bird’s nest isn’t easy, but Adora has finally made herself presentable. She walks across the large bedroom to turn the waterfall off (even after everything, being raised like she did means she doesn’t like the wasting of resources) before heading out. 

When she stares at her steel eyes in its reflection, she instinctively widens them. She feels something drop deep in her gut, like a big boulder being thrown into a lake. 

She hears them before they come in. Glimmer and Catra run into the room, Glimmer with a brush in hand. Catra playfully swats it away. After Horde Prime had chopped off her hair to fit the chip into her neck, Adora had thought Catra’s look was cute― until one night, during a time of rare sleep and mutual comforting after nightmares, she’d told Adora it felt like something important had been taken from her.

_We didn’t have a lot of freedom growing up,_ Catra had whispered into Adora’s sternum. _Growing my hair out was one of the few things I was allowed to do. When he cut it… well, when my hair grows back, I’m making sure it stays that way._

That doesn’t mean she was a fan of Glimmer’s style ideas, though.

“Don’t let her touch me!” Catra hides behind Adora, cackles failing to stay in her mouth. “She’s gonna torture me.”

Glimmer puts her hands on her hips. “Do you always have to be this dramatic?”

When Bow walks in, Adora’s senses get a bit fuzzy from there. She can’t breathe; her heart has made a nest in her tonsils. _When did they all get this old?_ It seems like yesterday they were still on their adventure across space, telling planets that Horde Prime’s cult days were over― back during a time where Catra would mock Bow for the patchy facial hair he was trying to grow in, when every planet had been so bright and beautiful to the four of them, when relationships on their ship were so new it felt like the personification of a newborn deer learning how to balance.

Now she’s pretty sure the calluses on her fingertips have been molded to fit right under Catra’s knuckles where they belong. Micah had just recently retired to give Glimmer the throne, saying all his time alone has made ruling an entire kingdom for more than a few years a bit too much for him. Glimmer had proposed to Bow mere days after her coronation, only to cry when he’d pulled a ring box out of his own pocket. Spinnerella and Netossa had started a family of their own, too. Glimmer had told Adora one night how hearing children giggling, up to no good, in the castle again made everything finally feel like it was meant to be. 

Scorpia, who, with Perfuma, Entrapta, Kyle, and Rogelio, had worked tiredly to make the Fright Zone back into the kingdom she’d been raised in, was now holding the celebratory ball for the grand opening of her castle. She’s pretty sure the last time all the princesses had been able to meet at the same time was at Frosta’s sixteenth birthday extravaganza― everyone is excited for a chance at another reunion. Even Mermista and Sea Hawk, who had started a surprisingly successful cruise line, and usually gone, were going to be there.

But what was right in front of her… she’s seen this picture before. Glimmer teasing Catra, her head resting on Bow’s shoulder. Back when it had felt like a dream too far away from her grasp. 

It’s as if she looked up and suddenly her arms had grown long enough to squeeze it tight and not let go.

“You coming?” Adora startles back, looking at Catra’s outstretched hand. Before she can respond, Catra is there, knuckles brushing her eyes. “Hey, are you okay?”

Oh, she’s crying. “I don’t know.”

Catra’s expression grows a bit more pensive. She doesn’t wait for Adora to let their hands meet like she had just a second ago. She holds Adora’s hands softly, strongly. “Is something wrong?”

“No!” Adora insists, but it’s faulty. “I just… you know how the Heart would project memories on you as a distraction.”

“Yeah.” Catra’s ear involuntarily twitches worriedly. 

“I… you were always in them.” Catra’s eyes grow soft, a bright sunset barely kissing the ocean. “But I had also thought it gave into my wishes.”

“Your wishes?”

“It showed me this. You… running in, Glimmer wanting to brush that mane of yours―” the tip of Catra’s lips quirk up, “―and then… the ball. I thought it was a wish.” Her vision grows watery again. “I think it showed me the future.” 

There’s silence. And then Catra says, “It knew the past. Maybe it knew the future.”

Adora looks at their joined hands. Catra has always generated warmth, having the body heat of an internal furnace, but now, the warmth is also in her expressions and mannerisms. Adora fell in love with the Catra built with sharp edges, but it’s a sweet contrast to be held by a Catra that has finally learned how to be content.

Still, a part of her can’t take Catra’s answer as the right answer.

“I just don’t understand how it would be able to predict something that hadn’t happened yet,” she says.

“I don’t know much about how time works,” Catra says, “so if you want that kind of answer, you should ask Entrapta. But I think some things are meant to happen. I’d like to think we’re one of them.” 

Adora can’t argue with that. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” Catra wiggles her eyebrows. “Pretty little thing.”

“Let’s leave before we give Glimmer and Bow the excuse to start making innuendos.” Adora rolls her eyes playfully, gives Catra’s outfit a look up and down. She then takes Catra by the hand and leads them out the door.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr is dykes and twitter is also virgoasc if you have any questions!


End file.
